Plan to SAVE the music industry

[craschowder]

So everyone downloads or copies music for fee now. Sales are WAY down. How do we fix it?

Here's my wacked out theory.

The music industry could introduce a brand new proprietary format. Both the medium and the player should be only compatible with each other and computers / cd players should not be able to fit the medium nor playback.

The OP of the system would be encoded wireless to the speakers/headphones. No analog headphone out, no line out, no aux out, no analog speaker out. No outs period. Since so many digital and analog recorders exist any of these outputs could be exploited.

The new player would have a cd drive and a mp3 dock to play 'old music' in our existing formats but there would be no burn/save option. This would also allow independent artists/bands to continue to distribute CD's if they chose to do so. Most serious artists without labels would send their music in for duplication on the new format. IE a new age discmakers.

The medium would be uncopyable (just like money) because it is only available to the industry. The integrity of this system should be protected by strict law.

A new generation a non-ipod portables would need to come to play that accepted the new medium. No hard drive as copying from one portable to another defeats the pourpose. DUH..

New music would be listened to on this new, un-copyable and hopefully high bit / resolution format. Similar to like the transition from tape to CD. Then eventually the re-release of the "classics" on the new format ($$$cha$ching$$$)

I think that could fix it.

True, this would mean changing everything. Not being able to listen to new music on your laptop. No Ipods with 30,000 songs.
LIKE IT WAS IN THE GOOD OLD DAYS. For me It was the early 90's. None of that stuff. It was great.

But this whole thing would also possibly mean pissing off and brining down numerous corporations so I can't see this happening.

Still...It's fun to theorize.

[The Chemist]

Of Course, then the people who know how to run an output of a playback machine to an input of a recorder will do that, export the songs as Mp3s, and upload them anyways, thus not solving anything.

[JoaT]

The system should come with the PTROLP (Properly Treated Room with Optimal Listening Position) as a standard.

Using of any other media device in the same room could be punishable by death penalty.

[@¶,*ƒƒƒ&™]

Here's what people think about the new high-resolution mediums:

Musician/Engineer Survey 2009 Results Photo Gallery - Photo 161 of 174 by Musician Engineer - MySpace Photos

[craschowder]

Originally Posted by The Chemist

Of Course, then the people who know how to run an output of a playback machine to an input of a recorder will do that, export the songs as Mp3s, and upload them anyways, thus not solving anything.

The OP of the system would be encoded wireless to the speakers/headphones. No analog headphone out, no line out, no aux out, no analog speaker out. No outs period. Since so many digital and analog recorders exist any of these outputs could be exploited.

[Dean Roddey]

Originally Posted by craschowder

The OP of the system would be encoded wireless to the speakers/headphones. No analog headphone out, no line out, no aux out, no analog speaker out. No outs period. Since so many digital and analog recorders exist any of these outputs could be exploited.

The signal to the actual headphone element or speaker cone is an analog output. There has to be a conversion to analog in order to drive a speaker or head phone amplifier. All you have to do is pull the speaker out and record the output. Not as good as original digital of course, but if the original is high quality, and the conversion is high quality, it would be more than enough for the downloader types to create an MP3 and still rip you off. And, because of the nature of the beast, only one person in the whole world has to take the time to do this in order to feed the entire world wide distribution of the song.

It will be extremely difficult to come up with any sort of technical solution to this problem. I've thought about it a lot and in the end it's just a form of asymmetric warfare, where the cost to defeat the weapon is always many orders of magnitude less than the cost of creating the weapon. It's hard to win in that kind of situation.

[SpiralTrance]

Originally Posted by craschowder

So everyone downloads or copies music for fee now. Sales are WAY down. How do we fix it?

Put simply you can't.

Originally Posted by craschowder

The music industry could introduce a brand new proprietary format. Both the medium and the player should be only compatible with each other and computers / cd players should not be able to fit the medium nor playback.

Do you honestly think that will sell.

Originally Posted by crawschoder

The medium would be uncopyable (just like money) because it is only available to the industry. The integrity of this system should be protected by strict law.

As soon as the devices reach china or russia a few will find there way into the hands of hackers\crackers. You could possibly use quantum encryption or something like that on it which would make it much harder for them crack but that push the price of the new media players through the roof. Good luck convincing the public to buy a portable media player that costs over £3k

Originally Posted by crawschoder

A new generation a non-ipod portables would need to come to play that accepted the new medium.

And you think Joe Bloggs will buy your new (and expensive) technology that he can't play his/her mp3s on.

[lagavulin16]

Originally Posted by The Chemist

Of Course, then the people who know how to run an output of a playback machine to an input of a recorder will do that, export the songs as Mp3s, and upload them anyways, thus not solving anything.

The problem is that you lack the genius to be a part of the record industry. YOU LACK VISION. Yet to me, the solution is obvious...

The solution is to ban all microphones, recording devices, and playback mediums outside of this new device.

Brilliant!

Now how are you going to pirate your precious MP3s, which can't be played back anyway?

[lagavulin16]

Originally Posted by Dean Roddey

The signal to the actual headphone element or speaker cone is an analog output. There has to be a conversion to analog in order to drive a speaker or head phone amplifier. All you have to do is pull the speaker out and record the output. Not as good as original digital of course, but if the original is high quality, and the conversion is high quality, it would be more than enough for the downloader types to create an MP3 and still rip you off. And, because of the nature of the beast, only one person in the whole world has to take the time to do this in order to feed the entire world wide distribution of the song.

It will be extremely difficult to come up with any sort of technical solution to this problem. I've thought about it a lot and in the end it's just a form of asymmetric warfare, where the cost to defeat the weapon is always many orders of magnitude less than the cost of creating the weapon. It's hard to win in that kind of situation.

The only true solutions probably wouldn't fly. You'd have to ban encryption, lock off the internet from the rest of the world, only allow connections to corporate websites, have ISPs monitor all traffic and put serious jailtime (like 10-20 years) for downloading a song.

[author]

Originally Posted by craschowder

The music industry could introduce a brand new proprietary format.

If you can hear it, you can copy it.

There's only one way to stop piracy: Make the dfegadISP's stop selling stolen songs!

[lagavulin16]

Originally Posted by author

If you can hear it, you can copy it.

There's only one way to stop piracy: Make the dfegadISP's stop selling stolen songs!

I'm not sure I follow you. If the ISPs start monitoring for MP3s or movies, people will just encrypt the data. Are you going to ban encryption?

[SpiralTrance]

Originally Posted by author

If you can hear it, you can copy it.

There's only one way to stop piracy: Make the dfegadISP's stop selling stolen songs!

The ISPs aren't selling stolen songs.

[mobius.media]

66% of Brits claim Spotify stops them illegally downloading News - PC Advisor

Three strike rule to be introduced for EU filesharers | IT PRO

[SpiralTrance]

Originally Posted by mobius.media

Three strike rule to be introduced for EU filesharers | IT PRO

The 3 stirkes rule is redundant as most downloaders are switching to newsgroups with SSL encryption.

[mobius.media]

Originally Posted by lagavulin16

I'm not sure I follow you. If the ISPs start monitoring for MP3s or movies, people will just encrypt the data. Are you going to ban encryption?

Encryption doesn't hide your IP, which can still be tracked by monitoring your seeds/leeches via the p2p protocol itself. To hide IP/identity you need a proxy/VPN system.

[SpiralTrance]

Originally Posted by mobius.media

Encryption doesn't hide your IP, which can still be tracked by monitoring your seeds/leeches via the p2p protocol itself. To hide IP/identity you need a proxy/VPN system.

P2P is for kids, n00bs and cheapskates. Most filesharers have moved to paid usenet accounts with 365 day retention, no ratios, SSL and a subscribtion to a good indexing service.

No matter what the music industry does the downloaders are always two steps ahead of them. They may as well try and stop a tsunami instead, they might have a bit more luck.

[mobius.media]

Originally Posted by SpiralTrance

The 3 stirkes rule is redundant as most downloaders are switching to newsgroups with SSL encryption.

Usenet is older than P2P. Newsgroups are centrally hosted. As such, the hosts are responsible for their content. One major US usenet company (usenet.com) was shut down earlier this year for piracy:

Usenet Loses RIAA Copyright Infringement Suit -- Copyright -- InformationWeek

Similarly, sites like MegaUpload or Rapidshare also centrally host, so both already must remove content by request (though not yet proactively like YouTube).

The closest thing to a truly immune piracy system is something like FreeNet, but there are strategies by which that could be cracked and monitored as well.

[SpiralTrance]

Originally Posted by mobius.media

Usenet is older than P2P. Newsgroups are centrally hosted. As such, the hosts are responsible for their content. One major US usenet company (usenet.com) was shut down earlier this year for piracy:

Correct, Usenet was the original internet before HTML. However most of the big usenet servers are based in countires like Latvia, Ukriane, Russia and a few in China where they have very sketchy cyber laws and the western entertainment corporations don't have as much influence.

They won't close them down for a while yet and by the time, or rather if, they do take down the eastern european/far eastern servers (another 5-10 years if they're lucky) someone will have thought up of a new way of being able to send data between two computers.

[mobius.media]

Originally Posted by SpiralTrance

Most of the big usenet servers are based in countires like latvia, ukriane, russia and a few in china where they have very sketchy cyber laws so the won't close them down for a while and by the time, or rather if, they do take down the eastern european servers out (about 5-10 years if they're lucky) someone will have thought up of a new method of sending data.

True, but laws are already being put in place (or are already in place) to force ISPs to routinely block traffic from illegal websites based internationally.

Currently, the laws in question are restricted to child pornography in application, but there's no reason once established they won't apply to other forms of illegal traffic as well.

[SpiralTrance]

Originally Posted by mobius.media

True, but laws are already being put in place (or are already in place) to force ISPs to routinely block traffic from illegal websites based internationally.

I just think they're rearranging deck chairs on the titanic, they block a server then the server changes it's IP and they're back to square one.

And I don't like the direction this could goto where we end up with everyone having to have spyware installed on there computers to make sure they aren't downloading a mp3.

Speculations aside, the fact is the music industry has brought the current situation on itself with the unwillingness to adapt.

[mobius.media]

Originally Posted by SpiralTrance

I don't like the direction this could goto where we end up with everyone having to have spyware installed on there computers to make sure they aren't downloading a mp3.

I don't think it needs to or will go that far. Policing of public channels is sufficient.

As an analogy, we don't have government cameras in our homes to monitor our activities, but we do have government cameras on public property at red lights and busy/dangerous intersections, as well as in subways, and few complain about that.

Currently all of the P2P/piracy monitoring is done only through open, public channels. No government hacking or spyware has been needed or implemented.

[SpiralTrance]

Originally Posted by mobius.media

I don't think it needs to or will go that far. Policing of public channels is sufficient.

As an analogy, we don't have government cameras in our homes to monitor our activities, but we do have government cameras on public property at red lights and busy/dangerous intersections, as well as in subways

Well here in the UK we're not very far away from that because the government here is talking about installing cameras in the homes of 'problem families'. It's a tip-toe tyranny.

And you know as well as I do that the release groups/uploaders/downloaders will always find away round the system and the government will respond they way they always do by penalising everyone for it and imposing more and more draconian laws. Similar situation is making everyone carry ID cards to stop the terroists when in actual fact it will do zero to stop terroism, though the data they can mine from monitoring peoples behaviour will be a nice earner for them.